Dr. John A. Bullinaria

I am currently a Senior Lecturer and the Director of Undergraduate Admissions
in the School of Computer Science
at the University of Birmingham.
My academic career began as a Theoretical Physicist with a PhD on
supergravity and other unified field theories from Southampton University,
followed by a post-doctoral research position in the Mathematics Department
of Durham University working on superstring theory and quantum gravity. I then
took a very early retirement to "travel the world". Having seen enough of
the world (i.e., run out of money), I returned to academia three years later
by retraining in Artificial Intelligence. I then took up a series of research
fellowships in the Psychology departments of Edinburgh University, Birkbeck College
London and Reading University working on various computational modelling projects.
I moved to Birmingham and switched to Computer Science in 2001.

My current research interests are mainly in the fields of Computational Intelligence,
Cognitive Science, and Artificial Life, particularly those aspects involving Neural
and Evolutionary Computation. Major projects in the past have involved models of
brain damage (connectionist neuropsychology), language processing (reading, spelling,
past tense production, lexical decision), adaptive control (particularly oculomotor
control), the optimization of neural information processing architectures (including
the emergence of modularity), and the formulation of more biologically realistic
evolutionary computation algorithms. Recently I have been mainly working on simulating
the evolution of neural systems: exploring the emergence of modularity, the optimization
of learning algorithms, critical periods for learning, the interaction of learning and
evolution, and aspects of Life History Evolution. I also have an ongoing interest in
corpus derived semantic representations, and real-world optimization applications
such as vehicle routing and bin packing.

Links to the rest of my web site

Publications page - contains a list of my publications,
with an increasing number of them available online.

Brief CV - find out which ten universities have been
lucky enough to have me there.

Artificial Life - population based simulations, the interaction of lifetime learning
and evolution, and aspects of life history evolution.

Representations of lexical semantics (working with Joe Levy, Roehampton University) - their
extraction from large spoken and written corpora, their optimization, their validation, and their
use in models of natural language processing.

Operations Research - real-world optimization applications such as vehicle routing and
bin packing.

Adaptable motor/sensor control systems - traditional and neural network models,
optimization by learning and evolution, the interaction of learning and evolution,
models of oculomotor control, and applications to robotics.

Connectionist neuropsychology - the simulation of brain damage using artificial neural
networks, the implications for the inference from double dissociation to modularity, and
the problems of small scale artefacts in such simulations.

Models of reading, spelling and past tense acquisition - NETtalk style models that
do not require pre-processing of the training data, the incorporation of semantic routes,
and the simulation of developmental and acquired dyslexias.

Models of lexical decision - managing without an explicit lexicon, cascaded activation
approaches to modeling reaction times, and the simulation of semantic, associative and
morphological priming.